1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing device, method, and program, and more specifically to a system of releasing a power-saving mode in a printer connected to a network.
2. Related Background Art
Several power-saving techniques for a printer connected to a network have been conventionally proposed. For example, it can be a method of stopping power supply to a print engine unit having relatively high power consumption when a print job is not received for a predetermined time through a network interface of a printer.
In addition to the above-mentioned method, there has been a method of further improving the power-saving effect by stopping power supply to the CPU except the parts required to activate a network interface unit, etc. in the print controller unit. It can be realized by activating the CPU by issuing a signal when the network interface unit receives a predetermined packet. In this case, the activation can also be realized by a broadcast packet. Therefore, when the current apparatus is set as a destination in the packet which is an activation condition, the CPU is frequently activated in some connected networks, thereby unintentionally attenuating the power-saving effect.
Therefore, a method of setting an activation condition using a magic packet technique proposed by AMD has been suggested. For example, the technology of activating a printer from a status (status in which power is turned on) in which the printer cannot perform communications by transmitting a special packet (for example, a magic packet) from a PC to a printer 100 when a printing process is to be performed when the printer 100 is in a low power consumption status with the power saved including in the communications unit for receiving a print job is disclosed by, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2002-287936.
However, by providing a proxy server with the conventional system maintained in the conventional host computer (job issuer), a special packet is communicated between a host computer and a printer. That is, in the system of directly setting a job from a host to a printer including print data, it is necessary that another apparatus or a system such as a proxy server, etc. is to be incorporated to support the host side as a special packet.
The present invention has been developed to solve the above-mentioned problems, and aims at providing a system of normally printing data by directly setting a job including print data from a job issuer to a printer device which can be activated in a state of performing various communications by receiving a specific packet.